We have now uploaded high-quality, watermark-free renditions of the concept art, including their original, unmodified filenames, given by Andrea herself. Check them out below!]

Well, isn’t this turning out to be an eventful week.

Another chapter in the dark history of the missing Half-Life threequel was written today, as our brothers-in-arms over at ValveTime have managed to get a hold of some pretty monumental stuff: 33 concept art images for Half-Life 2: Episode Three, dating from March 2008 (before EP3 was presumably cancelled, and then restarted development as Half-Life 3).

These concept drawings depict a variety of ideas and locations:

- a redesigned Alyx Vance, now wearing her deceased father’s clothes, as well as a variety of different outfits suitable for Arctic temperatures.

- the Xen borderworld, completely re-imagined, ten years after Xen was first envisioned for Half-Life 1. Somewhere in Xen, Gordon is depicted confronting a strange portal entity, as well as a Combine Advisor

- the crashed Resistance helicopter in the Arctic landscape, surrounded by all-new Combine structures similar in aspect to the Citadel, and similar in scale to the Depot.

- all-new characters: including the refugee inhabitants of the Arctic, and possibly a new Combine creature.

I have been able to independently verify the status of these images, and it does seem as though they are, in fact, real, possibly created by Valve’s own Andrea Wicklund.

Well… without further ado, here is what the newest entry in the Half-Life franchise looked like, as of March 2008. Beware, as these art pieces may represent game spoilers:

I must say, this is some pretty impressive stuff. While there are, of course, some possible spoilers for the game (a return to Xen, of course, was something very few of us thought would ever happen), it is some really jaw-dropping art overall. I just hope this stuff remains in the game.

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59 Comments

Seems legit. Most of these are actually fake ones, that they taunt people with on Steam XD The three after the NPC models were actually made into several Hammer editor scenes that they used on April first to make people think 3 was coming out, which of course it wasn’t. Anyway, there are some awesome pics here!

looks nice…I can imagine the plot…they go to the borealis, crash down with the chopper, fights a few advisors, then uses the ship to transfer to xen and kill some aliens, hoping to find shephard that is being kept by g-man and then they all togheter kill the boss…the end

Wow it is awesome to finally see some art for this game, and to see what kind of stuff they might do. I wanted so badly for this game to go back to Xen, and I’m so happy to see that it will! Ah the new Xen looks amazing, and I bet they can make it super cool with new technology. I can’t wait.

The 11th pic is my favourite in terms of a new style for Alyx, it’s awesome. As for one of the concepts where she’s wearing Eli’s jacket, that is actually awesome too. This is exciting stuff, really. Maybe this will all be worth the wait, hopefully.

I hope they don’t change Alyx’s model TOO much, it’ll feel like having an entirely different companion. It’s not like huge amounts of time have passed. I mean, isn’t Episode/Half-Life 3 supposed to pick up right where Episode 2 left off? That’s been the case for the previous three games.

Saw these at 5:30 this morning and could’t believe it. Even waited a few hours for a tweet to confirm that these were a hoax. Didn’t expect to see the exact opposite confirmation. Excitement doesn’t even cover 10% of the emotion here… Now if only my site would open up so we could write this up! *frustrations with technology*

Hey, Look at Pics 27,28,29,30 and the last one. Do any of you think it could be a space ship? It seems to be flying in some kind of “space” In the last shot, and its resisting some force in the 30th one. Pics 28, 29, and 30 remind me of an object being taken into a Black hole, where things are usually stretched by alot.

One of the images (the one showing him on Xen, with an Advisor behind him) clearly shows that there’s some sort of white cowl on his head – it doesn’t seem to be his parka’s hood, and it has some sort of weird symbol printed on it.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of speculation on that topic.
I don’t think the concept art really settles that debate though… what we see here could be mountainous areas towards the north of the White Forest, but they definitely look a lot like the Arctic too. Who knows?

Whoa… just whoa, some of these pics are gorgeous to look at!
I seriously like the new arctic outfits they’ve been making for Alyx, even I have a hard time choosing which one would look the best.
I’m glad they didn’t completely reuse the one of Alyx in HL2 when it was in beta stages, these look much better!
I just hope they aren’t going to change the skin and model that much, I mean she looks even great there but I hope these were just artistic concepts and not real game decisions, I don’t know.
I think ones where she’s wearing Eli’s jacket was a great idea!

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